Strategic Creative Work Breaks When Time Zones Don’t Match

If you’ve tried to run a creative project with a partner 10 to 12 time zones away, you already know what happens, and it surely is not pleasant. Feedback sent at the end of your day comes back with more questions the next morning. Simple decisions stretch across time zones. And when something needs to change quickly, it simply doesn’t.

This isn’t a one-time frustration; it’s one of the most frequent reasons why North American marketing leaders are re-thinking where they place their strategic creative and production work, moving away from other time zones towards Latin America. Data supports the shift, and so does what’s actually happening on the market.

Marketing automation and AI are reshaping media operations, reducing manual optimization and shifting human effort toward higher-value work such as strategy and creative development. As automation increases, operational media tasks become more standardized.

Creative production has not followed the same path.

Creative remains human-intensive. It requires interpretation, context, narrative judgment, and iteration. While AI can assist with drafts, the quality and effectiveness of creative still depend on the clarity of positioning and alignment between teams.

Here are five reasons why, backed by research and one honest perspective from someone who’s lived it.

1. The time zone problem is more serious than it sounds

A 10.5 to 12-hour gap means, in practice, one round of communication per day. For straightforward tasks, that’s manageable. For creative work, where questions come up mid-project, direction needs to shift quickly, and where a short call can save hours of rework, it’s a constant drag.

The report published by SSON Research & Analytics and Auxis, found that time zone compatibility was the most important factor for enterprise leaders choosing LATAM, cited by 60% of respondents. Support for North America from LATAM-based teams has grown from 44% in 2016 to 84% 

A team in Colombia, Mexico, or Costa Rica can join a call at 10 am your time without anyone having to stay after hours; that’s not a small convenience; it’s what makes real collaboration possible.

2. Communication is about more than speaking English

Proficiency matters, but today it’s not the whole picture. Strategic creative work involves ongoing conversations about tone, frequencies, messaging, audiences, and intent. This kind of context is harder to transfer across significant cultural and time distances.

The SSON/Auxis report found that over 60% of organizations in LATAM cited cultural affinity with the North American market as a critical decision factor. Deloitte’s Global Shared Services & Outsourcing Survey, which gathered responses from approximately 500 organizations across six industries, found that Mexico and Costa Rica had entered the top 10 preferred global shared services destinations, driven not just by cost, but by communication quality and alignment with client expectations.

For creative work, a misunderstood brief doesn’t just produce a wrong asset. It can mean two or three rounds of revision before the work is usable, and by that point, you’ve spent more time managing the process than you saved on cost.

Teams that align on strategy and share a common understanding outperform those that simply execute faster. In complex environments, coordination and clarity drive performance more than activity alone.

3. The nature of creative work has changed

A decade ago, most outsourced creative work was transactional; meanning resizing this, reformatting that, adapting this asset for a new channel. That kind of work travels well across time zones because it doesn’t require much real-time judgment.

Nowadays, it is no longer the case that most marketing teams need. Today, companies are asking outside partners to handle video production, motion graphics, campaign concepting, and creative direction, the type of work that requires genuine back-and-forth and the ability to make judgment calls in the moment while keeping the strategic intention of creative production.

Deloitte’s 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey, which surveyed more than 500 executives globally, found that organizations are increasingly outsourcing front-office functions, including marketing and creative work. For the first time since the pandemic, “access to talent” overtook cost reduction as the primary outsourcing driver, cited by only 34% in 2024, down from 70% in 2020.

The SSON/Auxis report confirms the same trend: “Latin America’s shared services industry evolved rapidly from purely transactional activities to a broad range of higher value-added services that include performance of judgment-intensive processes.” 81% of enterprise leaders cited LATAM’s ability to support more complex processes as a top advantage.

4. The gap in standalone creative services is real, still mostly unfilled

Data tells part of the story. But sometimes a single conversation captures what the numbers don’t.

A North American agency leader we recently spoke with described this shift clearly, sharing his observation about the market, quoting directly:

“A lot of agencies are going to run ads, PPC ads, display ads. That’s what we do. We’re media buyers. And then a lot of companies will do maybe websites or help you with your brand. But I feel like there’s fewer companies that are strategic creative production companies… a lot of them will just do the creative in order to get the campaign running and then run it on online advertising. So I think there is a niche there.”

He went further, identifying why that niche remains underserved:

“What you guys do takes time, and it’s not super scalable. It’s like a heavy labor kind of thing. So that’s why I think there’s less competition there. 

This is a precise description of why most agencies bundle creative with media buying or brand strategy rather than offering it as a standalone service; it’s harder to systematize and scale, and it requires a senior creative team at every stage. Earlier outsourcing relationships were effective for production, but as clients demanded sharper differentiation and stronger storytelling, the limitations became visible.

Media buying tools are increasingly standardized. Creative is not. The agencies that can actually do it, and do it well, are fewer than the market needs. 

He also identified the natural next step. Beyond production, he was looking for a partner capable of creative direction and campaign concepting, which means coming up with ideas that back up strategy, not just executing them. That combination of strategic thinking and production capability is rarer still, and it’s what separates a vendor from a genuine creative partner.

His team was no longer looking for vendors to execute predefined tasks. They were looking for partners who could interpret positioning, refine narratives, and collaborate in real time.

The issue is not production capacity but creative depth. Strategic creative production is a Dialogue, not a Deliverable that improves through on-time feedback loops.